At first, it was a self-portrait. I tried to make myself—my weak self, my pitiful self, my anxious self—into a joke or something funny that could be laughed at. It was sometimes seen as a parody or satire referring to contemporary people. As I continued to think about this, I expanded it to include consumers, city-dwellers, workers, and the Japanese people.
—Tetsuya Ishida
Gagosian is pleased to announce My Anxious Self, an extensive exhibition of paintings by the late Tetsuya Ishida (1973–2005) at Gagosian, 555 West 24th Street, New York, opening on September 12. Curated by Cecilia Alemani, the survey follows the announcement of Gagosian’s global representation of the Tetsuya Ishida Estate, which, along with notable private collections and the Shizuoka Prefectural Museum of Art, Japan, lent more than eighty works to the exhibition. My Anxious Self is the most comprehensive exhibition of the artist’s work to have been staged outside of Japan, and his first ever in New York.
Over the course of just ten years, Ishida produced a striking body of work centered on the theme of human alienation. He emerged as an artist during Japan’s “Lost Decade,” a recession that lasted through the 1990s, and his paintings capture the feelings of hopelessness, claustrophobia, and disconnection that characterized Japanese society during this time—even in the wake of its rapid technological advancement. Before his untimely death in 2005, Ishida conjured allegories of the challenges of contemporary life in paintings and works on paper charged with Kafkaesque absurdity.
In his introduction to the catalogue that accompanies the exhibition, Michiaki Ishida, the artist’s brother, confides, “Tetsuya’s wallet, which he kept until the end of his life, contained several American one-dollar bills. Perhaps it was his wish to go to New York, the center of contemporary art, one day. We are grateful that he finally has a chance to spend them.” Larry Gagosian, in his foreword to the publication, observes that Ishida’s oeuvre constitutes “a grand inquiry into the human condition in a way that feels urgent, timeless, and unusual for an artist so young.”
